The band was originally a three-piece, completed by a string bass player – first Larry Welborn, then Don Guess, and finally Joe B Mauldin. ![]() Two years younger than Holly, he was still in high school when he joined forces with the singer in 1955. “Buddy and I must’ve watched that film seven or eight times,” he remembered. In a world in which white youngsters were supposed to follow their parents’ example and listen to country music, the generation of Holly and Allison were entranced by the rhythm and blues they heard on black radio stations and by the hybrid form of rockabilly, with the records of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley acting as a guide to doing it for themselves.Īs he took his own first steps in music, Allison admired the extravagant big band style of Gene Krupa, the most celebrated drummer of the era, and the driving work of Charles Connor in the Little Richard band’s incendiary appearance during the film The Girl Can’t Help It. In 1950, after his family had moved to Lubbock, he met Holly at junior high school. The son of Louise (nee Ferguson) and James, Jerry Ivan Allison was born in Hillsboro, Texas, and was known to his friends throughout his life as “JI”. And on Well … All Right he played only his cymbals, underscoring the mood of wistful teenage reverie. ![]() On the song Not Fade Away (which he claimed to have co-written, although the credit went to Holly and Petty) he played on a cardboard box to create a lightweight version of the celebrated Bo Diddley beat. In those early days, when he was still in his teens, Allison was always ready to try something unorthodox. Released under Holly’s name, it was distinguished not just by the singer’s hiccuping delivery but by the galloping rhythm of Allison’s muffled tom-toms, rendered more exotic by a brainwave of Norman Petty, the producer, who turned the echo chamber on and off every few bars to create a startlingly unusual drum sound. Peggy Sue had first been titled Cindy Lou, borrowing the name of Holly’s niece, but was renamed at Allison’s request after Peggy Sue Gerron, his on-off girlfriend, whom he was trying to win back. A year later Holly left the group to pursue a solo career, and in 1959 he was killed in a plane crash, but his name and that of the group remain inextricably linked through such hits as Peggy Sue, Well … All Right and Think It Over, all of which Allison co-wrote. He had co-written it with Buddy Holly, their bespectacled singer and lead guitarist. That was back in a distant time when Dwight D Eisenhower was just starting his second term as president of the US.Īllison, who has died aged 82, was the drummer with the Crickets, who became known around the world in 1957, when their song That’ll Be the Day became one of the defining hits of the first rock’n’roll era. Whenever three or four kids get together with an electric guitar or two, a bass and a drum kit and decide to write their own songs, whether they decide to call themselves the Beatles, the Ramones, Nirvana or something that they’re still arguing about, they are essentially following a template laid down by Jerry Allison and his friends in the city of Lubbock, Texas.
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